Data has been around for many years it has seen transformations over the centuries from being stored on stones and paintings in caves to pen and paper, typewriters reovlutionizing the time to generate documents of data. In the last 3 years, the current incarnation of data has seen huge storage capacity boosts from relatively physically large 0.5GB hard drives to more modern tiny multi gigabyte micro sd cards.
An explosion of data has occurred every year more data is being generated from systems than the previous year. It might be from Enterprise Planning systems and Customer relation databases it might be regulatory required information. The most important thing is as a world, we are storing much more information than we previously might have done simply because , we can.
The future of data is on the brink of major changes, like the last three years, we shall undoubtedly see an equally incremental amount of data storage capacity. In 2013 I would not be surprised to see 1Pb hard drives becomming more common.
Handling of this data is a major task that needs management and IT to work together for common goals. Current data management tools are simply too inferior to handle data on that scale. The software is not scalable or capable of handling the scope. Development goals need to be included in long term strategies to have the capabilites in place to deal with the rise in data.
Portability, nowadays everyone has a mobile phone, and there are many people whom have a smart phone capable of viewing and even editing propietery applications’ data. Therefore data storage needs to support these systems being able to get at the information they need and in a timely manner.
Security becomes another major issue, although governments seem reluctant to keep data secure, the general public do not expect that from organizations. Systems must be put in place that allows staff access to the information that they need without comprimising on accessibility of the data.
Further, organizations need to consider what they want to do with the data. No longer is it practical for companies to store information in the hopes it will be a benefit. To make effective business decisions they need to consider the information that they have and use it in a logical productive method.
In the modern logic of data, it needs to be secure, scalable and accurate, but data management is not really about any of that. It is all about the user, the guy sitting at the reception looking for the customer records must be able to find them.
Without any of that, we might as well wipe the data.
References
ZDnet